Maclean Read Online Free PDF Page B

together. Altogether he looked like a pig except that the expression on a pig’s face was generally more intelligent.
    â€œI had a bad heart,” Walter said. “I kept goin’ down there to the Armoury, and they kept tellin’ me, ‘Walter you got a bad heart. With a heart like that, Walter, it would kill you in a week. With a heart like that, it’s just a wonder you’re alive.’”
    â€œIt’s a great honour to serve one’s King and Coontry,” Elmer pronounced from the end of the table. “The greatest honour there is.”
    â€œOurs not to reason why,” he intoned with upturned eyes. “Ours but to do and die. That’s what Mr. Churchill says.”
    â€œBullshit,” Maclean said into his plate.
    â€œNow, Mr. Maclean,” Miss Audrey said, “I didn’t hear that.”
    Maclean sat beside Henry on the front porch smoking a cigarette. The temperature had climbed all morning, and it was now nearly eighty, one of the last of the real summer days. Across the river, on the road that slanted up the face of the hill, a wagon loaded with bales of hay was being hauled up by a two-horse team so slowly that it seemed hardly to be moving.
    â€œDid you know,” Henry said, “that them stars we look at ain’t really there like that any more? What we’re looking at is the light they gave off thousands of years ago, so when we look at them, we’re looking back all that time.”
    â€œWell, well,” Maclean said.
    â€œI read somewhere in a book,” Henry said, “that there’s some philosopher who says that all the time that ever was is still right here, only in a different place. Now ain’t that something interesting to think about?”
    â€œIt is so,” Maclean said.
    With a hearty dinner in it, his stomach was feeling good now, and with all his worries cleared away, and the wherewithal in his pocket, he was feeling the need for a drink, a need all its own, like hunger or thirst or the need for a cigarette, but with its own peculiar quality of need the way each of those things had its own peculiar quality. It was a kind of void located at first somewhere at the back of the throat, then radiating out, spreading further and further as time went on, the way the good first drink radiated out, chasing that void and transforming it into lightness and a joy that passeth understanding.
    If it hadn’t been for all the time he had wasted at the high school, he would have had time to stop at the liquor store and get something before dinner.
    But it would have been crazy to stop when he had all that money on him. And if he’d got drinking, he could have ended up getting himself rolled somewhere. Better to do what he had done.
    He would leave some of the money here and then go up town. But first he would have a nap. The work, the brisk walk to the school, the standing around, the half-run back here had tired him out. He could hang on for another hour, then everything would be set up fine, and he would be feeling rested and ready.
    The dresser in his room had two small drawers at the top with a space under them big enough that something not too thick could be put there and the drawer run back in. This was where he hid money and ration coupons when he had more than he wanted to carry. His door had a lock, but Drusilla kept a key so that she and her two fat daughters could come in to clean up, and anyway the lock was so crude that anybody who took the trouble could open it with a piece of baling wire.
    Maclean put the ration book with his new liquor coupons and a fifty-cent piece and a quarter into an envelope and slipped them into his hiding place. Then he drew down the blind against the sunlight, took off his boots, and lay down. He looked at the stain on the ceiling and felt the memory of something he didn’t want to remember beginning to stir. He put it away and thought instead of the good afternoon that